I admit it: I may well be the world's worst ninja. My sense of timing is less than exemplary,…
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In a new interview posted by Gamasutra yesterday, Hayashi talks a bit about what he thinks went wrong, calling the game a "Japanese hamburger" and saying from now on, the team wants to stop making hamburgers and start making "damn good sushi."

"It seems like we made a Japanese hamburger for the West," says Team Ninja head Yosuke Hayashi, who spoke to Gamasutra at E3.

When the game was released and reviewed, he was forced to face the fact, however, that "maybe as a Japanese developer, we need to make good Japanese food... and that's what people are wanting from a Japanese developer."

Unfortunately, he says, "the state the Japanese industry is in right now" means that developers are "doing everything they can just to basically stay above water." This has lead to attempts to pander to Western tastes at the expense of what they do best, but Hayashi is optimistic that everyone giving their all to try and solve problems will result in "answers for how to move forward, and how to make things work in the future."

He's right: Japanese developers need to be playing to their strengths, not abusing cinematics and timed events in a futile attempt to make games more Western. In other words, we need more Suikoden.